I just spent the last several days reading the lengthy essay "Ying and Yang of Security" which explores the origins of security on the personal computer and explains why the current models are outdated. It seems to argue that security systems designed to keep the system safe are relics of the days of mainframes when the system was more important than the user, but for a personal computer the user is more important than the system.

Says who? So far, thats you. I read different views from people who were high at Netscape though.

Dating from when ? Netscape tried to reinvent itself several times after foolishly bringing the wrath of Microsoft down on themselves.

Please refer to them.

I would, but most of them are in dead-tree format a thousand kilometres away.

If you have nothing to back up your statements or are not interested to make back them up, then don't make such statements [...]

To the best of my knowledge this is a forum wherein I'm allowed to relate my opinions, beliefs, understanding, experience and knowledge.

[...] however instead of backing up your statements, you abuse various fallacies (argument of authority, argumentum ad hominem). In contrast, in this thread, i never went as low as calling names or refusing to back up statement with sources when requested.

Given your low level of participation in "this thread", that's probably an easy statement to make.

I don't believe I directed any spurious name calling straight at you. However, quite frankly I'm not going to feel any guilt over writing what I think - if I think someone's acting foolishly I'm going to say so.

My memory of the period 1997 - 1999 is of just about every industry pundit, journalist and analyst criticising Netscape's products and praising Microsoft's, accompanied by a large migration away from Navigator to IE (this was, I might add, a massive reversal of the period 1994 - 1996 when Netscape was the industry darling and Microsoft were "too far behind the curve to ever recover"). Yours might be different, so be it. Anyone else who was around at the time is either going to agree with you or agree with me and nothing either of us is going to say will change their minds. People who weren't actually there will get most of their knowledge from people who were and will probably never see any primary sources.

Most of my memory comes from a wide variety of *printed* material and from on-line sources that have almost certainly since either been shut down or moved around too much to be findable in any reasonable timeframe. As previously mentioned, I'm not going to spend hours, if not days, digging them up to appease someone on a web forum whose mind is already made up.